


Understanding

by JulyStorms



Series: Before Colors Broke into Shades [36]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Shingeki no Kyojin: Kuinaki Sentaku | Attack on Titan: No Regrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 17:57:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4147350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hange and Levi learn to understand one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Understanding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [petrichorstarlight](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=petrichorstarlight).



> Prompt: When we were too dumb to understand each other, sent by [historicallyhistoria](http://historicallyhistoria.tumblr.com) on Tumblr.
> 
> Hange and Levi probably developed an understanding between them early into their acquaintance, so I thought it might be kind of neat if Hange only ever struggled to understand why Levi wouldn't help the SC out with regards to teaching them to fight like him. The one mystery she couldn't solve without asking him about it directly. His answer, of course, to his own friends, was that he didn't want to be responsible for anyone else, but I think there's more to it than that.

He should have expected it, should have known from the start that Zoë Hange was not the sort of person to believe in doing anything halfway. He fell into her life and not the other way around; the Survey Corps was her territory first, but within it she had been nothing more than a part of the scenery until she’d taken the time to introduce herself.

Her eyes were too wide then, her face too round.

He had thought, startled by her interruption, that she was too much like him. Young, like he was, but youth wasn’t part of a dichotomy. She was also old, lines beginning to form by her mouth that might have led a lesser man to believe that she smiled too much; Levi recognized them for what they were.

They had their first understanding as she waited for him to respond to her, as she waited for the answers to questions nobody had the courage to _really_ ask. These queries merely skimmed the surface, could never encompass the reality of these people’s world. That they would look to a stranger for advice in their own desperation was painful.

But something in his eyes flashed-dimmed, and Hange understood: she took her wide brown eyes and her not-smile lines and her messy hair with her to the other side of the room.

If he thought himself free of Hange’s curiosity, though, he was wrong. She came back again and again over the next weeks, bringing with her more questions and books and her thoughts, which were very clear some days and twisted into knots others. He always listened, though he wasn’t sure why he ought to bother. Maybe he took the time to do it because she took the time to talk to him, treated him as if his opinion mattered, even on the most trivial of things.

One day, months into their awkward acquaintanceship, she asked a question:

“Why did you refuse to tell us how to fight like you?”

“If you still don’t get it,” was his answer, “then you don’t know me at all.”

“I do, though,” she said, and adjusted her glasses, bumping up the rim with the back of her hand to keep it settled on her nose. The way she stared at him was unnerving. “I know you very well, and that’s why I’m confused. You always act like you’re selfish, like you don’t care, but I know that you do. I know you better than anyone here.”

_You know me better than anyone in the world_ , he thought. It was pathetic, really, that someone who had known him less than a year could know more about him than anyone else in the entire fucking world, and most of it without him having to say anything at all.

He shrugged.

“So?” she asked, prompting him for some kind of response.

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“I never said you did, but it’d be nice to get an answer: a real one, a straight one.” She smiled, and the lines beside her mouth deepened, made her look thirty-five instead of twenty-whatever like he was. It wasn’t a bad look for her. “One I don’t have to figure out all on my own.”

He thought about telling her she was shit out of luck, but it was a simple question with an easy answer and stubbornness alone never kept a man alive.

“It’s not something you can learn,” he said after a moment, when her smile finally started to fade.

“Oh? Can’t I?”

He shrugged again, the barest lift of his shoulders—a gesture meant to show he didn’t care, though Hange knew better.

Of course she did.

What he wouldn’t fucking give to be able to teach everyone to fight exactly like he did.

“I tried,” he said, not looking away from her or her smile, which began to fade into something softer. “Not you—others.”

She tilted her head to the side. “And it didn’t work.” It was a guess disguised as a statement. He nodded. “I’m not like them, you know.”

It was partially true. “You’re not like me, either.” That was what he was trying to say, what he couldn’t quite get out straight and unbent and untwisted.

 “What does that mean?” she asked, and he could almost see her thoughts, the way she looked at his words and dissected them to try to make sense of who he was and what he meant. They were close to the same age and yet much older than that, but even Hange knew that he meant they were different in another, bigger, more important way.

He tried to think of a way to explain it that didn’t make him sound insane, but considering what the Survey Corps faced on a regular basis, would they even care? If fucking titans roamed outside the walls, how was his existence and experience any stranger?

“When I was a kid,” he tried, and wasn’t sure why he was telling this to Hange at all, except that her face turned very serious and she leaned forward to rest her chin in her hands as if what he had to say mattered more to her than anything else. He looked away from her and her flyaway hair and her too-big eyes magnified by the smudged glasses perched on her nose. “I killed a man.”

She didn’t say anything, though he expected her to act surprised or horrified or any other number of things. Even sympathy would be better than silence. But she said nothing and left him flailing, grasping for words to fill the expectant silence between them.

“It was like waking up,” he said, lamely, and risked a glance at her.

She was frowning in concentration. “So you think there’s something about you that’s just—“

“Different,” he finished. _Sinister_ , he didn’t say.

Her frown flipped over and then she was smiling at him again. “You do fight in a way I can’t make sense of. I mean, naturally I can’t, seeing as how I’m fighting, too, but—some things should be much more difficult to pull off, yet you manage them regularly and without trouble. You also don’t seem to do any of it to look cool. So…you don’t want to teach people how to fight like you because it probably won’t work, right? Because it’ll just get them killed if they try it and their reaction time isn’t spot on. Am I close?”

Of course she was. She knew him better than anyone. “Their reaction time will never be good enough,” he said.

“Of course. Because they’re not you. You’re _different_.”

“Don’t make it sound like a goddamn joke.”

She held up her hands and gave him an innocent smile. “I didn’t mean it like that. You _are_ different, Levi, whether you want to be or not. I mean we _all_ are, or we wouldn’t be here, but we’re not the same as you. Even Mike’s never had any kind of _awakening_ , and he’s good—better than most of us.”

Levi remembered getting his face pushed into the dirty puddle in the underground city and scowled. “Yes,” he admitted; Mike was good, and too tall and bulky to look as if he’d be effective using three-dimensional maneuvering gear, but he had learned to use his size to his advantage.

“So I have a theory,” she told him, suddenly, hand tapping the table between them, grinning as if they were the best of friends, now, and that meant he had to be party to her games. “Now, I don’t think you’re a titan—though wouldn’t that be amazing?—but it’s possible you’re something else. You know, there are stories about certain families who possess…”


End file.
